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Monday, June 26, 2006

Connecticut party officials were particularly incensed when President Bush kissed Lieberman on the cheek following his 2005 State of the Union address. In meetings with state Dems, Lieberman tried to assuage their concerns, but also kept reminding party officials he had a 70% approval rating. Even so, the attacks on the kiss became so vocal that an exasperated Lieberman told one group of Democrats "I didn't kiss him back," a response that didn't exactly hearten them. (The incident has become so radioactive that Lieberman now denies Bush actually kissed him, telling TIME last week "I don't think he kissed me, he leaned over and gave me a hug and said "thank you for being a patriotic American.")

Joe Lieberman's reelection campaign for U.S. Senate has already been widely criticized, even by conservatives sympathetic to the candidate, for its low-grade attack tactics on Ned Lamont, the challenger seeking to wrest the Democratic Party nomination from the three-term senator in an Aug. 8 primary. In terms of outright lying, gutter graphics, and utterly misleading twisting of fact, the Lieberman campaign may have hit a new Rove-ian/Atwater-ian milestone with the two-sided glossy direct-mail flyer which Democratic voters in Connecticut started receiving at their homes on Saturday. It was the second glossy direct-mailer the Lieberman campaign sent within a week.

The Lie"Ask Ned Lamont Why..." the back page begins.One of the "ask whys" read as follows: "... He Hired The Former Republican Party Chairman To Run His Senate Campaign."Not true. Connecticut's leading left-leaning Democratic Party activist, Tom Swan, runs the Ned Lamont campaign.The flyer is referring to someone else, Tom D'Amore. D'Amore ran the state Republican Party in the 1980s. He quit in 1990 to help Lowell Weicker defeat the Republicans and win the governor's office as an independent. D'Amore is a registered independent.He in no way "runs" the Lamont campaign. The Lamont campaign did hire his firm, Doyle, D'Amore & Balducci (the third named partner being the former Democratic speaker of the Connecticut House of Representatives), to do consulting work.The Lieberman flyer cites me as a source for this lie: "Source: Paul Bass column, Hartford Courant, 3/26/06."Actually, my column in the Courant that day made no mention of D'Amore working for Lieberman. I did mention in a March 5 Courant column that D'Amore might do consulting work for Lamont. (Apologies: Those particular columns are no longer available on the Courant's web site.) On March 13, the Independent did report the fact that D'Amore agreed to sign on as a consultant.The relevant point is that nowhere was it ever reported that D'Amore would run the campaign. That's a crucial distinction. Lieberman is trying to fight back against the Lamont campaign's argument that based on his support of the agenda of President Bush and right-wing Republicans in Washington on key issues, Lieberman isn't a true Democrat. So it has tried to portray Lamont -- who, in direct contrast to Lieberman, is running against Iraq war, against Lieberman-supported Bush nominees like U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and Supreme Court Justice John Robers, against the Bush-Cheney energy bill, for universal health care -- as the Republican in the race.As is widely and publicly known, Lamont's campaign manager, the person who works full-time running every aspect of the effort day to day and is in charge of strategy, is Swan. He's on leave from his regular job as director of the state's leading liberal advocacy organization at the Captiol, the Connecticut Citizen Action Group.

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About

Bob Brigham is a communication consultant specializing in netroots, online, blogosphere, and post-broadcast strategy for progressive causes. The ideas posted here are his own reflections and do not necessarily reflect the views of any client or campaign.
bob.brigham [at] gmail